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Shonda Rhimes On Running Three Hit Shows And Not Getting Married

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 05:35 PST, Nov 20, 2015

Shonda Rhimes clearly owns prime-time ABC as the creator of two hit shows on the network, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. She also serves as the executive producer of How to Get Away with Murder. And it’s no wonder since, as NPR Books reports, in an interview with Terry Gross from Fresh Air, she reveals she has been creating stories since she was 3-years-old.

“I probably started storytelling when I was about three. We had a little kitchen pantry and it was filled with canned goods and I have really vivid memories of my mother in the kitchen, the television on playing the Watergate hearings, and me inside the pantry playing my own little version of… the Watergate hearings… with the cans.”

There is no more need for cans for Shonda Rhimes, who is the Queen of Prime-time and is so busy she had to take a look at her schedule and set some boundaries.

“Work will happen 24 hours a day, 365 days a year if you let it. It suddenly occurred to me that unless I just say, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ it was always going to happen…. Since turning off my phone at 7 p.m., there’s never been a thing so urgent that I regret having my phone off.”

Shonda Rhimes might need to scale it back so she isn’t working 24/7, but she loves what she does. According to NPR Books, in her Fresh Air interview, Rhimes talked about the first pilot she ever wrote and how it led to the creation of Grey’s Anatomy.

“The pilot that I wrote first was a pilot about journalists. It was about war correspondents, actually, and it was about very strong, competitive women who really enjoyed covering war. And it didn’t get made because we were kind of at war and they felt it was inappropriate to see people really enjoying covering war when real soldiers were dying. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I really enjoyed writing this pilot experience. I’d love to do it again.’ I was at ABC and I said, ‘Well, what does [CEO] Bob Iger want?’ And somebody said, ‘Well, he really wants a medical show.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s right up my alley,’ because I love watching all those surgeries on those cable channels, and I think all this stuff is really interesting, and I had been a candy-striper in high school.”

It is clear that Shonda Rhimes’ creativity knows no bounds, even if her schedule does. She has a lot of creative freedom in her work, so much so that she even admitted on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore to killing off a character because she didn’t like the actor.

Who knows who it was, but there is plenty of speculation on Twitter.

Shonda Rhimes has three children, is single, and has always been happy that way. Back in September, Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly that when writing Year of Yes, she realized she didn’t want to get married.

“Now if somebody says, ‘Are you looking for [a husband]?’ I say, ‘Nope, looking for a boyfriend, not a husband.’ And there’s a freedom to that. There’s no pressure if you’re not looking for it.”

But more recently, Shonda Rhimes spoke with People and said that she reserves the right to change her mind about getting married.

“I don’t know. As I said in the book, [‘Year of Yes’], maybe when I’m 75 or when my youngest in graduating from college, who know? Maybe I’ll change my mind but right now I don’t see it.”

Regardless of whether or not Shonda Rhimes gets married, she will remain a force in the creative world of television dramas. And if she does get married one day, he will be one lucky man!

[Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images]

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